1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to broadcast material, and more specifically, to methods and systems for managing authentication and payment for use of broadcast material.
2. Background
In the context of wireless broadcast, there is an advantage to using spare broadcast capacity to distribute non-requested material or content to terminals for storage, even though the user may or may not care about the content at the time of distribution. The terminals may be mobile including, for example, a mobile phone. The content may include a variety of information including, for example, textual information, audio-visual material, games, etc. Typically, the broadcast service provider who distributed the content may restrict its subsequent access.
The broadcast service provider may then make the content stored on a terminal available to a user at a later time, perhaps for a fee in some cases. With the content stored at a terminal, the user may browse the currently available content and then decide whether to have continued access. For example, a user might decide to try out a new game that is currently stored on his/her mobile phone.
The foregoing arrangement allows the user to have efficient access to the content. However, such arrangement also presents a couple of security issues. First, the broadcast service provider needs to ensure that the user is not able to deny having received the content; second, nothing sent by the broadcast service provider to the terminal should enable anyone other than the intended user to access the content. To address these issues, some current solutions rely on the terminal being trustworthy. Given the sophisticated level of security breaches, relying on the trustworthiness of the terminal to protect the integrity of stored content may not be sufficient. In other solutions, a well known cryptographic protocol called “Fair Exchange”, or variations thereof, is used to encrypt the broadcast content. This protocol, however, has a number of drawbacks when used in connection with the foregoing arrangement. For example, this protocol requires the involvement of a trusted third party whose role is to provide some objective level of authenticity between two parties; also, the messages generated under this protocol always require some form of digital signatures and/or zero knowledge proofs, which are computationally expensive; and furthermore, this protocol requires the use of asymmetric (public) keys which may not be provisioned into the terminal.
Hence, it would be desirable to provide more efficient methods and systems for managing authentication and payment for use of broadcast material.